


Catching Up

by Elster



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Drunk Sex, M/M, carlos has them, cecil is awesome, commitment issues, or something like it, well of night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 19:17:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4637079
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elster/pseuds/Elster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil comes home after visiting the Well of Night. Carlos is sort of horrible at this whole boyfriend thing, but he's getting better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Catching Up

**Author's Note:**

> Potential spoilers up to 'Well of Night'

 

The bang of a door wakes Carlos. Or to be more precise: it doesn’t wake him, but makes his consciousness drift lazily from deep sleep to be aware enough to sort through his senses: no screams, no smoke, no bright lights, no crawling, no shivers, no feeling of dread or impending doom, he notes fuzzily.

Shuffling steps on the bedroom floor, humming: Cecil.

“Uff”, Cecil makes as he lands on the bed and half on Carlos, flailing with the blanket for a moment and then curling around him. Carlos lets himself be pushed on his back, feels Cecil slot into him perfectly imperfect, bones knocking together and skin touching.

“Are you awake?” Cecil asks, chin sharp on Carlos’ shoulder and breath hot against his neck. Carlos makes a sort of ‘hrmmm’ sound to communicate that he is undecided on that point himself.

“You really can sleep through anything, can you, sweet Carlos,” Cecil asks and chuckles. He starts kissing his neck and Carlos’ consciousness takes notice and decides that waking wouldn’t be so horrible.

“Side ‘fect of living with ‘n army of masked giants,” Carlos mumbles.

“Hm!” Cecil makes. “I can see how that would be a useful skill to develop.”

He sounds happy. Or well, Cecil has been floating on a cloud of happiness ever since Carlos came back from the desert otherworld, but now he sounds positively euphoric, practically vibrating with energy. He smells of sweat and blood and black magic. The thought meanders through Carlos’ sleepy mind for a long moment, before it causes a mental double take: how exactly does black magic smell?

In the name of scientific discovery Carlos cards his hand through Cecil’s hair and turns his head a bit until he can press his nose behind his ear and smell him. Is his hair shorter?

“Where have you been?” he asks. Not alarmed – or not more than usual. Carlos hasn’t felt particularly alarmed in a long time now; when permanently stimulated, any sense gets numbed over time. He feels mostly curious at the moment. Or well, a bit curious and a bit tired still and mostly lazily turned on.

“At the old well,” Cecil says. “You remember the chanting and the light? Well, I joined them and there was that beautiful bright darkness and ritual dancing and chanting and I’ve met the loveliest people!”

Cecil sounds a bit drunk and Carlos has just discovered a cut on his throat, but it’s quite shallow and whatever that well-stuff was about, it sounds mostly like a very strange sort of rave and – in the Night Vale scheme of things – mostly harmless. “Yeah?” he asks, amused and maybe a little bit concerned.

Cecil laughs and pushes himself up to kiss Carlos’ nose. “No-one as lovely as you.”

Carlos opens his eyes to look at Cecil looking down at him. In the greenish pre-dawn light his eyes have a strange color and he looks very earnest and sort of impish at the same time. It is one of these brilliant, perfect, completely terrifying moments, when Carlos knows that he should say something back. But he is not a poet, he is not used to employing metaphors. He is a scientist, he deals in facts and precise descriptions and it all breaks down in the face of the endless night sky, the timeless mystery of existence and death and the infinity of what Cecil makes him feel.

And so he says nothing for a long moment and Cecil smiles down at him, so fondly, and pets his hair. And Carlos tries to come up with something coherent and fails and says “you’re lovely, too”, which is horribly lame (he could at least have thought of a different adjective instead of just repeating Cecil’s) and, while true, so catastrophically insufficient as a description of Cecil, that it could just as well be a lie.

So Carlos decides that, to avoid further embarrassment, they should definitely commence the sex. He kisses Cecil; his mouth tastes like black magic and bright darkness. Cecil hums happily and lets Carlos roll them around so they’re lying on their sides, legs tangled, bodies pressed together. They spent an afternoon like this when Cecil visited him in the desert otherworld, too fucked out to move, too horny to sleep. It’s not so long ago, but Carlos remembers those days with the sepia perfection of nostalgia already, uncomplicated; entirely separated from the guilt and indecision of the last year.

Cecil’s skin tastes salty with sweat and he is so keyed up, his whole body is shaking with the hyperactive energy of exhaustion that hasn’t yet caught up with you. They rock together and kiss and touch. When they have sex, Cecil’s hands are endlessly wandering, like he can’t decide what part of Carlos he wants to touch first. (“Your hair and your ass”, Cecil said matter-of-fact-ly when Carlos teased him about it, “and everything inbetween”, he added with a grin and a wink, “and your legs and feet, of course.”)

When they climax eventually it’s almost more of an afterthought, Cecil’s low moan turning into breathless laughter huffing against Carlos’ lips. And then he’s laughing, too, because that’s the only sensible thing to do when you’re ridiculously happy.

He gets a tissue and cleans them up a bit and Cecil seems to have fallen asleep, so Carlos just watches him (and yeah, he would feel creepy about that, but he lives in Night Vale now, so who cares).

“I’ve been thinking”, he says after a while and it’s easy, because Cecil is asleep, “about the volatile nature of existence and how existence is inevitably tied to non-existence, every beginning tied to an end and every living thing tied to its death, how everything awful is tied to the happiness about its eventual negation and everything beautiful is tied to grief and I’ve been thinking about feelings and how they’re... – well, they’re not very well quantifiable in any way, are they? And even though linguistically, they are all sorted and described and defined to a point, who can tell, if what one person feels is in any way like what another feels, even if they are using the same words to describe it? And if one feeling is making you feel something else, is the sum of those feelings a new feeling, or–“ Carlos stops and takes a deep breath.

“I think I love you and it terrifies me,” he whispers. He takes another deep breath, and another, and one more, until he feels like he can breathe normally again. It’s not like he’s hyperventilating or anything, it’s probably just Cecil’s weight against his chest. _Loving you is like riding a roller coaster without breaks_ , he thinks, and it’s such an awful simile, he could never bring himself to voice it. But he also doesn’t know how he could say it any better. _Loving you is like trying to build a beach resort out of nothing, without ever having built so much as a sandcastle._

“I’m really terrible at this. You deserve someone who does this right, who doesn’t run away and hide and make you miserable just because he’s afraid. Or at least someone, who doesn’t need a year to figure out that’s what he’s doing.”

Cecil shifts in his sleep, rolling from mostly atop to mostly aside Carlos while wrapping himself more completely around him. It’s surprisingly comfortable. Carlos lies awake for a time, watching the sky outside the window get brighter.

“I should tell you”, he says after a while. “And I will, when I’ve thought it through, but I’m not ready yet.” He’s still not entirely sure how to explain the elation of the oak door closing, of being sealed off from Night Vale, where everything horrible and wonderful could happen and from Cecil who would die for Night Vale – _had_ almost died for Night Vale. He isn’t sure how to explain the tranquilizing comfort of Kevin’s distant adoration. He is not sure how to explain that moment when the army of masked giants destroyed his work and thinking, for a second, that he would be crushed and waiting for the feeling and eventually realizing that he didn’t care, that he hadn’t cared about his work for a whole year, hadn’t cared about anything for a whole year. He isn’t sure how to explain that, simultaneously, this makes him sure about what he has to do, but also more afraid than he’s ever been.

He falls asleep before figuring it out and when he wakes up, Cecil has gone to work already. Later, turning the radio on, there’s a repeat of last night’s broadcast.

“-for a short time”, Cecil’s voice says, “we all chanted and did aerobics as one. We all mattered to each other, even though we knew we didn’t matter at all. That seems wrong, I know, but two conflicting things can exist simultaneously. And they did. And it was a great moment. One I will cherish.”

And Carlos will never know what Cecil said next, because he’s laughing. He’s laughing, because it is comforting and frustrating how Cecil is always – and has always been – ten steps ahead of him. Because of simultaneous happiness and horror.

 


End file.
